Cairo Contested: Governance, Urban Space, and Global Modernity

GOVERNANCE, URBAN SPACE, AND GLOBAL MODERNITY

Edited by

Diane Singerman

The American University in Cairo Press

Cairo   New York

First published in 2009 by

The American University in Cairo Press

113 Sharia Kasr el Aini, Cairo, Egypt

420 Fifth Avenue, New York 10018

www.aucpress.com

Copyright © 2009 by Diane Singerman

An earlier version of Chapter 5 appeared in: Samia Mehrez, Egypt’s Culture Wars: Politics and Practice (London: Routledge, 2008), 144–68. Reproduced by permission.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

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Dar el Kutub No. 4093/09

ISBN 978 977 416 288 6

Dar el Kutub Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Singerman, Diane

Cairo Contested: Governance, Urban Space, and Global Modernity Cairo / Cairo Contested.—Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2009

p. cm.

ISBN 978 977 416 288 6

1. Marketing 2. Markets I. Singerman, Diane (ed.)

381

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 14 13 12 11 10 09

Designed by Fatiha Bouzidi

To the courageous, creative ‘city-makers’ of Cairo who continue to govern, design, and construct their city while fighting for more space, inclusion, voice, meaning, equality, and citizenship within it.

And to the memory of Marsha Pripstein Posusney (1953–2008), an ardent supporter of Cairo’s citizens and labor movement activists.

Contents

Contributors

Acknowledgments

Introduction

The Contested City

Diane Singerman

Contested Space, Authority, Security, and Meaning

1 Making or Shaking the State: Urban Boundaries of State Control and Popular Appropriation in Sayyida Zaynab Model Park

Khaled Adham

2 Cairo as Capital of Islamic Institutions? Al-Azhar Islamic University, the State, and the City

Malika Zeghal

3 Policing Mulids and Their Meaning

Samuli Schielke

4 The Siege of Imbaba, Egypt’s Internal ‘Other,’ and the Criminalization of Politics

Diane Singerman

5 From the Hara to the ‘Imara: Emerging Urban Metaphors in the Literary Production of Contemporary Cairo

Samia Mehrez

Cairo’s Governance: Ambiguity, Legalities, Informality, and Mobilization

6 Cairo’s City Government: The Crisis of Local Administration and the Refusal of Urban Citizenship

Sarah Ben Néfissa

7 The Dictatorship of the Straight Line and the Myth of Social Disorder: Revisiting Informality in Cairo

Agnès Deboulet

8 Extract from a Diary: Marginal Notes on the Soft Dialectics of Historic Cairo

Kareem Ibrahim

9 Of Demolitions and Donors: The Problematics of State Intervention in Informal Cairo

W.J. Dorman

10 Banished by the Quake: Urban Cairenes Displaced from the Historic Center to the Desert Periphery

Bénédicte Florin

11 Cousins, Neighbors, and Citizens in Imbaba: The Genesis and Self-neutralization of a Rebel Political Territory

Patrick Haenni

12 Economic Liberalization and Union Struggles in Cairo

Agnieszka Paczynska

13 Land Disputes, the Informal City, and Environmental Discourse in Cairo

Jennifer Bell

Markets, Marketing, and Globalized Identities

14 Market Spaces: Merchants Battle the Economic Narratives of Development Experts

Jörg Gertel

15 Political Consumerism and the Boycott of American Goods in Egypt

Taline Djerdjerian

16 Amr Khaled and Young Muslim Elites: Islamism and the Consolidation of Mainstream Muslim Piety in Egypt

Hania Sobhy

17 African Refugees and Diasporic Struggles in Cairo

Mulki Al-Sharmani and Katarzyna Grabska

Contributors

Khaled Adham is an architect, assistant professor at the United Arab Emirates University, and an associate professor at the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning, Suez Canal University. His publications and current research activities are focused on contemporary architectural and urban transformations of Cairo, Doha, and Dubai.

Jennifer Bell is an independent scholar in New York City. Her 2006 PhD dissertation at New York University, Power, Politics and Pollution: The Political Economy of Environmentalism in Egypt focuses on environmental activism and urban politics in Cairo.

Agnès Deboulet is professor of sociology at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris-la Villette. She has carried out research on popular urbanization in Cairo, and more recently, Beirut, and currently works on urban renewal processes and migrations. She is the author and editor of Les Compétences des Citadins dans le Monde Arabe (with I. Berry-Chikhaoui, 2001); Dynamiques de la Pauvreté en Afrique du Nord et au Moyen-Orient (with B. Destremau and F. Ireton, 2004); and Villes Internationales: Entre Tensions et Réactions des Habitants (I. Berry-Chikhaoui and L. Roulleau Berger, 2007).

Taline Djerdjerian is a sociocultural anthropologist and has taught for several years at Concordia University, Montreal. Her research interests focus on poverty, female-headed households, and women’s changing roles in Armenian society since gaining independence from the former Soviet Union.

W.J. Dorman lectures on Middle East politics at the School of Government and International Affairs at Durham University. His research interests include state-society relations and the impact of authoritarianism on state capacity in Egypt and Iraq highlighted by his work Informal Cairo: Between Islamist Insurgency and the Neglectful State? published in Security Dialogue (2009).

Bénédicte Florin is a professor of geography at Tours University and a researcher at Equipe Monde Arabe et Méditerranéen. Her publications focus upon residential mobility, spatial and social practices of Cairene housing projects, new cities, and gated communities as well as the effects of privatization on the garbage collection system on the Zabbalin community.

Jörg Gertel is a geographer and professor at Leipzig University. His publications include Globalisierte Nahrungskrisen–Bruchzone Kairo (2009) and Krisenherd Khartoum (1993). He is the editor of The Metropolitan Food System of Cairo (1995), and co-editor of Pastoral Morocco: Globalizing Scapes of Mobility and Insecurity (2007).

Katarzyna Grabska was research coordinator and researcher at the FMRS program at the American University in Cairo. Between 2002 and 2006, she conducted research on the economic conditions of Sudanese refugees in Egypt and policies toward forced migrants. She is currently completing a doctorate at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, with a focus on changes in gender relations resulting from displacement among southern Sudanese refugees returning to Sudan.

Patrick Haenni is a researcher at the Religioscope Foundation (www.religion.info), co-president of the Polarités Foundation, and a scientific adviser at the Humanitarian Dialogue Institute. Previously, he has been a researcher at the Centre d’Études et de Documentation Économiques, Juridiques et Sociales (CEDEJ) in Cairo and an analyst for the International Crisis Group in Lebanon. His publications on Islamization and Islamism in the Muslim world and the west include L’islam de Marché, l’autre Révolution Conservatrice (2005).

Kareem Ibrahim graduated from Cairo University’s Faculty of Architectural Engineering in 1995. He is a founding member and former president of the Egyptian Earth Construction Association, and has designed environmentally and culturally appropriate architecture throughout Egypt. Before joining Aga Khan Cultural Services—Egypt in 1997, he worked on the United Nations Development Programme’s Historic Cairo Rehabilitation Project. He is currently the technical coordinator of the Darb al-Ahmar Revitalization Project, overseeing the rehabilitation of houses, the construction of public buildings, and the development of the district’s planning activities.

Samia Mehrez is professor of Arabic literature at the American University in Cairo. She is author of Egyptian Writers between History and Fiction (1994, 2005), Egypt’s Culture Wars (2008), and The Literary Atlas of Cairo and The Literary Life of Cairo (forthcoming), which will be published simultaneously in English and Arabic. She has also published on postcolonial literatures, translation theory, gender studies, and cultural studies.

Sarah Ben Néfissa is a political science researcher at l’Institut de Recherche pour le Développement. Her major publications include Vote et Démocratie dans l’Égypte Contemporaine (2005), NGOs and Governance in the Arab World (2005), and Associations et Pouvoirs dans le Monde Arabe (2002).

Agnieszka Paczynska is associate professor at the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University. She has written on economic reforms, political transitions, security, and globalization. She is the author of State, Labor and the Transition to a Market Economy: Egypt, Poland, Mexico and the Czech Republic (2009).

Samuli Schielke is a research fellow at the Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin. He has conducted ethnographic research about the contestation of mulids, the ambivalent outcomes of the Islamic revival, and the aspiration and frustrations of provincial Egypt. He co-edited Dimensions of Locality: Muslim Saints, Their Place and Space (with George Stauth, 2008) and co-directed the documentary film Messages from Paradise #1 (with Daniela Swarowsky, 2009).

Mulki Al-Sharmani is an assistant research professor of anthropology at the Social Research Center at the American University in Cairo. She also teaches at the Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies and the Center for Migration and Refugee Studies at the American University in Cairo. She has written on forced migration and transnationalism in the Middle East and North Africa regions, child protection policies in Egypt, and Egyptian family law and gender justice.

Diane Singerman is an associate professor of political science in the Department of Government at American University’s School of Public Affairs. She has written about Egyptian politics, gender, urbanity, and informal politics in Avenues of Participation: Family, Politics, and Networks in Urban Quarters of Cairo (1995), Cairo Cosmopolitan: Politics, Culture, and Urban Space in the New Globalized Middle East (co-edited with Paul Amar, 2006), and Development, Change, and Gender in Cairo: A View from the Household (co-edited with Homa Hoodfar, 1996).

Hania Sobhy is a PhD student in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Her current research interests include the political economy of development, especially in the area of education reform and contemporary Islamist discourses. She has worked in education policy and research in Egypt and taught politics and economics in Montreal, Cairo, and Exeter, UK.

Malika Zeghal is associate professor of anthropology and sociology of religion and Islamic studies in the Divinity School, the University of Chicago. She is interested in Islamist movements, states, and the institutionalization of Islam in the Muslim world, with special focus on the Middle East and North Africa in the postcolonial period and on Muslim diasporas in North America and Western Europe. Her publications include Gardiens de l’Islam. Les oulémas d’al-Azhar dans l’Egypte contemporaine (1996), and Islamism in Morocco: Religion, Authoritarianism, and Electoral Politics (2008).

Acknowledgments

Today’s virtual, globalized world has not only redrawn the spatial political economy of Cairo, but it has also facilitated the editing of this collection and the vision for this project, which has brought together scholars from across the world and across disciplines. Editing this volume and co-editing Cairo Cosmopolitan: Politics, Culture, and Urban Space in the New Globalized Middle East with Paul Amar, I have felt like the node of an insightful and compelling global research network which I was honored to transform into two books. Small details about wholesale price formation or the distribution of risks between producers, wholesalers, and retailers in a fruit and vegetable market; asylum claims for refugees; the layout of roads and commercial spaces in informal housing areas; permits needed for religious festivals; or a diary of a single nineteenth-century building and the negotiations around it to demolish or save it revealed the stakes involved in renegotiating Cairo. I hope our modest insights will somehow constructively feed back into specific struggles in Cairo and inspire pragmatic, inclusive, and creative ways to solve problems and shape policy.

This project grew out of the intellectual atmosphere and community at CEDEJ (le Centre d’Etudes et de Documentation Economiques, Juridiques et Sociales) in Cairo and I am very appreciative of their intellectual hospitality. Many of the ideas and much of the vision for this project were developed in tandem with Paul Amar and they have continued to influence the research paradigm of the Cairo School of Urban Studies, infused throughout Cairo Contested. I am also very grateful for his translation and early editing of several of these chapters.

Several of the authors in this volume originally wrote their chapters in French. They were skillfully translated and edited by Suzanne Braswell at the University of California Santa Barbara and Paul Amar. I also turned to Clara Fon-Sing for translation and communication assistance for which I am grateful. I have been very fortunate to have had the critical help of several graduate research assistants at American University and I cannot thank them enough, including Anna Olsson, Seda Demiralp, Mary Breeding, Mohamed Alaa Abdel-Moneim, Nadra Garas, Korneliya Bachiyska, Ali Ozdogan, and Adel Ait-Ghezala. I would also like to thank the American University students in my honors seminar on Cairo in Spring 2008, many of whom also participated in a study tour to Cairo, for their enthusiasm and wonderful questions, which furthered my thinking about many issues raised in this volume.

Nadia Naqib has supervised the publication of this volume at the American University in Cairo Press from its beginning and I have relied upon her far more than is typical of an editor. She has always been very helpful, insightful, and patient, while gently urging me on to the next step in the process. Neil Hewison at the AUC Press was kind enough to support the publication of not one, but two volumes from this project, and his commitment to the Cairo School of Urban Studies, along with Mark Linz’s, has been deeply appreciated. I am also very grateful and appreciative of Jasmina Brankovic’s excellent copy-editing, the fine technical and artistic skills of Fatiha Bouzidi, and the wonderful photography of Shawn Baldwin, Themba Lewis, Khaled Adham, Randa Shaath, Jean Pierre Ribière, Kareem Ibrahim, Samuli Schielke, Agnès Deboulet, Bérengère Deluc, Pascal Sebah, Bénédicte Florin, Jörg Gertel, Stacy Schafer, and Miriam Aertker in this volume.

We are all a product of a community of scholars, friends, and family and I am very grateful to have had support from so many quarters. Eva Bellin and Homa Hoodfar have been great friends and colleagues for many years and our phone conversations sustain me. Perhaps after this volume is done I can turn virtual and telephone communities into more face-to-face contact. I am also grateful for the intellectual and institutional support from Ann Lesch, Marsha Pripstein Posusney, John Waterbury, Samir Khalaf, the Social Research Center at the American University in Cairo, the School of Public Affairs at American University and its Dean, William Leogrande, an SPA Development Award, former Government Department chairs Candice Nelson and Saul Newman, CEDEJ, and Princeton University. I continue to be indebted to my fictive kin from several extended families in Bab al-Sha‘riya for their insights and friendship that has endured for more than twenty years.

Nicole Salimbene-Bauman, Dirksen Bauman, Sheila and Peter Blake, Sue Katz-Miller and Paul Miller, Christina Garcia, Katherine Russell, Beth Garrigus, John Raht, and George Marquis are wonderfully supportive, engaging, and inspiring friends and I am so thankful to them. I continue to rely on the deep sisterhood, kindness, and wisdom of Leni Singerman. Phyllis Singerman and the Singerman clan have been helpful in so many ways throughout my career. The Wapner clan has also supported this book in many ways and that extends to the next generation of Zeke and Eliza, whose lives have been most affected by this book. Their frustration with a busy mother was fairly civil as they went about their interesting, creative lives and surrounded themselves with great friends. I am grateful for their understanding, patience, and love, as I continue to learn so much from them. In both an everyday and deeply fundamental way, I am grateful to Paul Wapner for our partnership, his wonderful parenting skills, and his commitment to be in the moment.

Finally, it is the authors in this collection, however, who deserve the most thanks for their commitment to this project and patience with its production. I look forward to continuing our conversation.

Introduction

The Contested City

Diane Singerman

Neoliberalism from the Sky

The city of Cairo, like all global mega-cities, is entrenched in processes of globalization where flows of labor, capital, and information are re-shaping its physical boundaries, the structure of the economy, and its political landscape.¹ The Egyptian state seeks to remake itself as the Tiger on the Nile, a growth engine that will not only sustain Egypt’s regional dominance but also propel it to become a truly global capital, drawing investment for its industry, franchises, services, and new ‘planned’ cities in the desert. The country’s heritage and its monuments attract millions of tourists annually, and tourism has become a pillar of the nation’s economy and a lucrative industry.

From a governance analysis, globalization gets its way by marching through the mechanisms of public power. It captures the imagination and enlists the organs of the state at the national level and then inspires the state to translate globalization’s dictums through regional, municipal, and even neighborhood levels of collective life. Here, at the capillaries of government, globalization writes itself onto the lives of ordinary people, inflecting them with norms, styles, and discourses that, although generated from afar, soon become almost second nature. Globalization succeeds because it is facilitated through levels of governance that continually knead it as a product so that, when it appears at one’s doorstep, it appears almost homegrown.

While there is little consensus on a definition of globalization, one of its implicit assumptions is that national sovereignty diminishes as global circuits of financial capital and information instantaneously traverse national boundaries and a new stratum of very powerful global regulatory mechanisms supersede national decision-making authorities and bodies (Mittelman 2000; Saleh 2005). As jobs in one economy migrate overseas to reduce production costs, financial speculation threatens national economies, or foreign migrants compete for low-wage work away from home, globalization seems to take on a diffuse, agent-less character. In Egypt, processes of globalization are deeply entwined with a neoliberal agenda that has dismantled, diminished, and privatized (in part) the formerly large public sector. While Egypt’s integration into the world economy has not been as extensive as some post-colonial nations (in terms of the value of foreign investment, foreign export-oriented manufacturing, or the penetration of global financial services) the impact of this even limited integration has been profound (Vignal and Denis 2006).² El Shakry describes the change as a shift from a social welfare mode of regulation to a neo-liberal mode of regulation (2006, 74). The Egyptian regime turned away from the state socialism and post-colonial nationalism of Nasser with the ascendance of President Anwar Sadat (1970–81). The decision to open Egypt up to foreign capital and global financial institutions (called the Infitah) intensified under President Husni Mubarak (1981–present), as Paczynska describes in this volume. Slowly at first, but picking up speed in the 1990s, the government reduced public services and subsidies, sold off a significant share of the large public sector, reduced government employment, and changed its laws to attract foreign capital and institutions, franchise operations, and tourists to the capital city.

Neoliberal globalization has not, of course, gone unchallenged. In Cairo as elsewhere in the world, the city’s citizens have not simply aligned themselves with the forces of globalization despite the government’s best efforts. Cairo’s economy also maintains its industrial and manufacturing base unlike other globalized service-oriented economies, and welcomed new capital and new imported technology while deepening its reliance on the productive, low-wage illegal and quasi-legal ‘sweatshop’ manufacturing sector (see Vignal and Denis 2006, 102). In being shaped by globalization, Cairenes have also translated its imperatives into their own vernacular, finding ways to ride through the political-economic changes of globalization with minimal disruption. Many have also directly resisted or transformed globalization.

Cairo Contested is about the dynamics of neoliberal globalization in Cairo. It originated in questions that an international cohort of scholars raised in the late 1990s, when the power of globalization dramatically met resistance. Many of the authors in this volume were engaged in detailed fieldwork about Egyptian political and urban life at the time. By the 1990s, opposition movements, largely Islamist in orientation, were very powerful and assertive, mobilizing and organizing followers in mass movements and clandestine groups, some of which used violence against the state. An enlarged public sphere and less media censorship offered detailed critiques of the Egyptian state, its morality, efficacy, and its foreign, western supporters. The state, of course, cracked down on much dissent. It jailed thousands of Islamists and other political actors and chilled even mildly reformist efforts by labor, political leaders, and civil society activists. The opposition movements of the 1990s and violence in the countryside and cities, whether by the security forces or the Islamists, has to be seen not only as a moral and political critique, framed in an Islamist, leftist, or liberal worldview, but also as a reaction to the neoliberal agenda of the Egyptian state, within the context of globalization.

Many of the scholars who contributed to the first product of this collaboration, Cairo Cosmopolitan: Politics, Culture, and Urban Space in the New Globalized Middle East, and to this volume were quite interested in this resistance, the successes and failures of social and political movements, and the political fate of popular critique (2006). We came from different disciplines, countries, and national academic traditions and many of us shared a sense—after much research, language training (for some of us), and discussion with our peers— that although the conventional story of Egypt’s strong security apparatus, its vast bureaucratic institutions, and even its neoliberal economic turn was very complex, the mythic, essentialist, and crude meta-narratives about Cairo (as explosive as a bomb, or as passive and apathetic as a tomb) and its problems were missing something (Singerman and Amar 2006, 21).

Some of the strongest Islamist movements emerged in Upper Egypt, yet Islamists were getting arrested and confronting authorities in the new sprawling neighborhoods of Cairo that were products of what Deboulet in this volume calls the neoliberal generation. A spatial approach that conveys some of the territorial and geographically rooted struggles of Cairenes offers a very concrete perspective of the physicality of neoliberal space—tied to specific neighborhoods, state institutions, and ‘master’ plans. One way to capture our concerns is to think of ‘Neoliberalism from the sky,’ which corrupts a wonderful phrase that Deboulet uses—architecture from the sky. Many urban planners and architects, she argues, view the city from afar and thus see an undifferentiated mass that superficially quantifies individuals and ignores their specific important social, historical, and relational identities, and the way these express themselves and dynamically interact on the ground. Denying the social embeddedness of Cairenes also leads to distorted policies and failed ‘solutions’ to their problems.

Neighborhoods such as Ain Shams, Bulaq al-Dakrur, al-Zawiya al-Hamra, or Munira al-Gharbiya in Imbaba are labeled ‘ashwa’iyat; informal, unplanned or, literally random or spontaneous areas, and these labels convey a rather negative, if not disorderly character. The needs, identities, problems, hopes, and political ideals of the people in these new neighborhoods thus receive little attention and yet it is these dimensions that fundamentally constitute public life and it is through such dimensions that the contested character of, and resistance to, neoliberal globalization finds expression.

As the Egyptian state turned away from its social contract and provisionary role, Egypt’s burgeoning population began building affordable housing on the only available land: agricultural land surrounding Cairo and other major cities. However, it was technically illegal to build on this land because it was zoned exclusively for agricultural production. One study found that 81 percent of informal settlements were built on privately owned agricultural land, about 10 percent were established on desert (state lands), and the rest on agricultural land nominally claimed by the state (Cities Alliance 2008, 8). Total agricultural land losses since 1982 were estimated at approximately 1.2 million feddans by 2004 (World Bank 2008, 63). Fueled in part by remittances sent back by Egyptians working in Libya, Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia in the 1980s, a tremendous amount of new construction was not only built illegally on agricultural land, but also many buildings were built, renovated, or enlarged throughout the city without recourse to zoning and construction regulations. In 2003 the then minister of housing and population, Mohamed Ibrahim Soliman, suggested that 88 percent of housing in Egypt was in violation of the building code (Farag 2003).

While estimates of the size and population of informal housing areas are disputed, Sims and Séjourné argued in 2006 that they included more than 65 percent of the Greater Cairo region population (10.5 out of 16.2 millions inhabitants) and had been growing at about 2 percent annually between 1996 and 2006 (Egyptian-German Participatory Development Programme [PDP] 2009, 17).³ Families would slowly and carefully engage in complex negotiations to build or purchase apartments in these new areas, reinforcing their ownership of their new housing, despite its illegality or extra-legality, through customary quasi-legal norms and the use of selective official, legal maneuvers. ‘Ashwa’iyat are products of neoliberalism to the degree that such housing was often financed by remittances, was in reaction to skyrocketing real estate prices, as Egypt’s economy became internationalized, and took on a networked character that itself broke down earlier boundaries that had demarcated communities and distinguished legal methods of expanding housing. In this later sense, as Deboulet and Florin describe in this volume, residents invested in the infrastructure of new neighborhoods, purchasing, stealing, or appropriating public utilities, ceding some land for roads and markets, and launching transportation systems to connect them to the rest of their cities, particularly to their workplaces. Further boundaries were blurred as the state curtailed the Nasserist investment in public housing blocs for the working class and state employees, and the private sector produced ‘ashwa’iyat largely through familial capital and labor or small-scale contracting.⁴ The rent control laws, which date back to the British colonial period, but which were reinforced under Nasser, depressed rents in Cairo at the same time that land prices were increasing. Many landlords had largely abandoned upkeep of real estate, and families could not afford to move and thus tried to retain their apartments across generations. In general, Egypt has a very low rate of residential mobility so the rapid growth of informal housing is even more striking (between 1986 and 1996 only 6.3 percent of the country’s population moved into new residences or 0.6 percent on average; almost a third of those moving were newlyweds; in Greater Cairo, residential mobility is limited only to 2 percent of families per year [World Bank 2008, 11]). At the same time, since housing is so expensive and marriage norms demand that a newlywed couple have their housing options in place before they marry, families save for the next generation’s housing needs by adding additional floors to their homes, or securing new apartments for their children elsewhere.⁵ Thus despite housing pressures, there are also extremely high ‘vacancy’ rates of residential housing in urban Egypt, in excess of 20 to 30% of the housing stock, depending on the definition of ‘vacant’ (World Bank 2008, 36). Of course, an additional factor in these high vacancy rates is real estate speculation as investors purchase land, apartments, or villas in new private developments (some of which are funded by global investors) and then hope to ‘flip them’ when they resell them later as their property appreciates in value.

Until the rise of Islamist movements and some particularly violent confrontations between the state and the Islamists, informal housing areas were largely ignored and left to their own devices. It is as if the state suddenly ‘discovered’ these vast areas with millions of people living in them since they had not made claims on the state, at least not in a collective voice, before the roiling years of the 1980s and 1990s. It is this claims-making process, the exercise in voice and resistance, which suddenly made ‘ashwa’iyat visible and legible on the national stage and led to a public clamoring to reform, upgrade, ‘civilize,’ and improve these areas, as discussed by many authors in this volume (see Haenni, Dorman, Deboulet, Bell, and Singerman). The catalyst that provoked the attention and the hurried plans for more state attention and control was the strength of Islamist resistance and its ability to seize opportunities and react quickly to crises such as the major 1992 earthquake in Cairo, which caused vast destruction and hundreds of deaths, as poorly built and old housing crumbled (see Florin in this volume). Some scholars have argued that these movements created parallel governments, or at least governance structures (since norms and rules can also be generated outside of formal, legal, governmental structures), which called for the imposition of Islamic law and the greater enforcement and policing of morality, increased piety, and religious observance (Ismail 2006, Clark 2003, Wickham 2003). Islamist movements as well as more conventional religious institutions began to offer a wide range of services such as health care, tutoring, mediation, religious education, sports, and youth activities to the community at the same time that the state was decreasing these same services or their price grew unaffordable to many as global recession and the ‘free market’ hit Egypt in the early 1990s and early 2000s.

Yet, the question remains as to why it was so easy for these movements to build a parallel government or alternative governance structures that intentionally tried to mimic the state that they described as unIslamic, corrupt, and unjust. Where was municipal or local government in the ‘ashwa’iyat? If millions of people lived in these areas, as all our data now confirm, why weren’t the residents represented and integrated into the state’s municipal power structure? To what extent did they support the oppositional movements that arose among them? More generally, how do we understand the interface of globalization and its resistors in a neoliberalizing, yet still authoritarian, Cairo.

The Mapping of Power: Governance, Technocratic Politics, and Planning

Many chapters in this volume suggest that part of the answer to these questions can be found at the level of municipal or local government. In Egypt, and Cairo more specifically, municipal bodies are often weak, impermeable, and extremely ineffective—yet this impermeability, a term that Ben Néfissa uses in her chapter on city governance, has a very clear logic and rationale to it. Dorman’s chapter uses the term negligent governance to describe the incompetent and indifferent state that has had limited success in improving the physical environment and basic service provisions (utilities, roads, schools, transport, healthcare) in ‘ashwa’iyat (and in other parts of the city). Dorman rejects the weak state paradigm argument as an explanation because he notes that Egypt has hardly been bereft of financial resources and has received at least $65 billion in U.S. military and economic aid alone since the country’s alliance with the west in the 1970s.

The funds increased particularly after the signing of the Camp David Accords in 1978, which ended the state of war between Egypt and Israel. Despite such amounts, the centralized bureaucracy controls this foreign aid and these funds are rarely available to the municipal or neighborhood level of governance. Moreover, municipal authorities have little power to extract and retain locally generated revenue (World Bank 2008, 56–57).

Ben Néfissa argues that municipal government has little more than the power of propositions as they draw up plan after master plan to improve the city but actually have limited financial resources and authority to implement such visions. Indeed, our authors suggest that municipal governance is weakened by porous boundaries of authority between competing and overlapping bureaucracies, vague jurisdictions, and the extensive centralization of power in Egypt at the national level. While the mantra of recent reforms has been the decentralization of power in Egypt and its devolution to the local level, informal decentralization really has meant that national and international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or private citizens often bear its financial costs (see Ben Néfissa and Dorman in this volume). As the story unfolds in many developing countries experiencing structural adjustment and neoliberalism, state power does not retire or fade away but exercises power at reduced cost through various intermediaries and private actors (Hibou 1999). As Sutton and Fahmi argue, private dynamism has replaced public planning. Greater Cairo has not been mastered or planned (2001, 135).

In the name of efficiency, growth, and progress, within a neoliberal framework, issues are framed in a technocratic, management, and apolitical language and the provincial or national government deals directly with private-sector actors as opposed to elected officials or local authorities. Similarly, in recent Moroccan campaigns to decentralize power, it was the "techno-walis (regional governors), tied to the monarchy and the central government, who gained more power at the expense of local voters, and local elected officials and entire jurisdictions dealing with urban issues" were transferred from the municipalities to national or international private groups such as utility companies (Catusse, Cattedra, and Idrissi-Janati 2007, 114, 121).

Several chapters in this volume argue that the Egyptian state’s fear and suspicion of the political participation and collective organization of its citizens, of every political and civic stripe, leads the regime to devalue and weaken municipal governance and instead to view city issues, projects, policies, and services as the terrain of national bureaucratic actors. In other words, the weakness and impermeability of municipal government is intentional and institutionalized as a defensive mechanism that serves to maintain and consolidate regime power. The logic of neglectful rule, according to Dorman, is not simply due to a scarcity of resources to service, regulate, and improve the city, but can be understood better as a mix of disengagement, clientelism, and fear that views land and housing itself as an important spoil to distribute to its loyal followers. Thus, he argues, we shouldn’t expect the government to embrace land titling and regularization efforts that would provide security of tenure, a legal status, and housing equity to millions of Cairenes because these kinds of programs would reduce the financial arsenal of state patronage.

In case study after case study, residents of Cairo’s administrative districts are shown to have little official participation in governing their neighborhoods, and, as Ben Néfissa argues in her chapter, do not even know where to go or who to seek out to address some of their concerns. Simple complaints about housing, sewers, overcrowded schools, or poor roads and transportation are perceived not as problems to be solved with the participation of residents or elected representatives but as necessitating the involvement and intervention of national bureaucratic actors, civil servants, national ministries and ministers, often from different overlapping or competing agencies whose purvey and decision-making is opaque or overtly inaccessible to public scrutiny. Kareem Ibrahim’s chapter in this volume explores some of these paradoxes, turf battles, opaque government policies, and weak governance through the saga of one nineteenth-century building in al-Darb al-Ahmar, as one of its tenants tries to save the building from the owner’s bureaucratic and legal strategy to demolish it and build a new commercial building in its place. Some of the concerned and proactive municipal employees that had tried to help preserve this threatened building, relied on their ‘insider’ knowledge to circumvent their own rules and regulations. In these cases, the resolution of problems are often exceptional, irregular, or a result of intervention by more powerful authorities outside of normal channels, and thus they are difficult to replicate, institutionalize, or model for the next petitioner.

Yet, at the same time, while municipal governance is opaque and impermeable, we can see what Zeghal in this volume calls the mapping of state power as the state implements its master plans, designs parks, buildings, and communities; enforces its regulations and implements court decisions; arrests people and collects fines; demolishes buildings; shutters workshops; bulldozes markets; and forcibly ‘removes’ residents and their noisy, polluting, or ‘dirty’ workshops and businesses from one area to another due to the ‘public interest’ or disasters such as fires, earthquakes, or rock slides. What (and who) defines an activity as polluting, noisy, dirty, or unhealthy is, of course, a matter of great debate and contestation.

Gertel’s chapter in this volume analyzes the Egyptian government’s decision to relocate the wholesale fruit and vegetable market from Rod al-Farag, a centrally located, densely populated working and lower middle class neighborhood, to a ‘modern,’ gleaming, new market seven times bigger and located more than twenty kilometers away, near Cairo’s international airport. His chapter not only explains the neoliberal logic (to expand agricultural exports, deregulate prices, and increase ‘efficiency’) that was behind the market’s ultimately violent closure (merchants confronted the police when the government finally tried to close the market; two thousand people were taken into custody by a thousand security personnel; and many were arrested) but it also reveals in stark detail the failure of neo-classical models to understand the workings of the Rod al-Farag market. The chapter is very instructive for its appreciation of the social construction of knowledge and the ways in which abstract categories such as ‘the market’ or the ‘the free market’ are deployed to legitimize and implement neoliberal policies. Through detailed, lengthy, ethnographic study of the complexities of the Rod al-Farag market, Gertel was able to understand the largely Upper Egyptian families who controlled its pricing, credit, distribution, and trading mechanisms, which the economists and development experts who had visited the market in short trips failed to realize because they completely ignored the history of the market, its financial logic, and its political relations. Even more importantly, without understanding the social relations inscribed into the market they could not translate complex social structures into numerical relation systems and run their regression models (Gertel in this volume; see also Mitchell 2005). In this case study, several years of organized resistance and protest failed to overcome the hegemonic, yet inept, inadequate and incorrect neo-classical economic framework and a small fenced park now stands on the remains of the dynamic Rod al-Farag market.

Several chapters in this volume tell the opposite story, however—of residents fighting back successfully and contesting forced ‘removals’ or demolition orders after they block roads and bulldozers, talk to reporters, seek redress in the courts, or solicit support for their resistance from NGOs, political parties, celebrities, important political leaders, and even ministers (see Ibrahim, Bell, Haenni, and Dorman in this volume). Spatially, these confrontations occur more frequently in ‘ashwa’iyat because, as Ben Néfissa argues in her chapter, working class citizens are more attuned to power exercised on the ground because only the state can provide essential public services such as sewers, electricity, and water. And thus the dynamics of state power are matters of extreme importance. Not only are services better in wealthier areas to begin with, but when pipes break, or roads become impassable, these better connected residents can, by contrast, use their informal networks and patronage ties to complain directly to governorate officials, ministers, or bureaucrats and they are treated with care when they make demands, as Ben Néfissa explains in her chapter.

Before exploring this claim about the critical importance of opaque and impermeable municipal governance further, I first want to backtrack slightly to tie this argument to the original discussion of globalization. While scholars generally agree that globalization diminishes national sovereignty and third world nations have little recourse to set the terms of globalization, people living in neoliberal spaces are doubly disenfranchised, since their national leadership has not only become more externally dependent and externally oriented but they have such weak political representation in that government to begin with. Thus, the remaking of a street lamp to look ‘historic,’ surrounding a public square with a fence to supposedly make it cleaner and more modern, the opening of a new shopping mall for middle class consumers, or the construction of a flashy museum to lure tourists to the Pyramids, conveys to Cairo’s residents not only Egypt’s outward-oriented economy but their own distance from their government and the little influence they bring to bear on these policies and the use of their financial resources. They are supposed to produce, consume, and service this new economy but their lives are being reshaped spatially by globalization and neoliberalism in very concrete and often negative ways.

Contested Space: Land, Real Estate, and Neoliberal Models

The title of this book, Cairo Contested, is intended to underline the fact that this process of neoliberalism provokes struggles and increased stratification, inequalities, hierarchies, and ‘difference’ among Egyptians. In the past twenty-five years, the growth of the private sector, enhanced by a favorable regulatory framework (including the very important repeal of land reform laws and tenancy rights dating back to the Nasserist period in the countryside and urban rent control laws in the city) has increased the value of land and real estate, despite inflation (Cities Alliance 2008, 10; World Bank 2008, 39–40). Investment opportunities in other sectors of the country continue to be limited and risky for many, while ironically land has become much easier to buy, sell, and rent, and real estate speculation is very popular.

‘Neoliberalism from the Sky’ creates and physically embeds stark spatial differences in Cairo. Dividing the city and literally constructing demarcations of difference by building new towns and gated communities serves to legitimize the superiority of the new and ‘modern’ and the inferiority of the ‘old’ and haphazard. During the Sadat era, the Master Plan of 1974/1975 outlined the creation of eighteen new towns in the desert surrounding the Cairo Metropolitan Region (made up of Cairo, and parts of Giza and Qalubiya governorates) to draw people away from Cairo and ‘deconcentrate’ population while offering tax incentives for Egyptians to relocate to new industrial belts in these areas and foreigners to establish factories, high-tech services, and franchise operations (El Shakry 2006, 25). In 1996, President Mubarak reaffirmed the New Town strategy, but with far more of a capitalist, neoliberal direction, declaring that the ‘conquest of the desert’ is no longer a slogan or dream but a necessity dictated by spiraling population growth. What is required is not a token exodus into the desert but a complete reconsideration of the distribution of population throughout the country (Arab Republic of Egypt and the World Bank 2008, 52; Al-Ahram Weekly 1997, 2.). Yet, it is extremely important to point out the inequities that this frontier metaphor of reclaiming the desert creates and reinforces. The success of Mubarak’s vision depends on what Tsing has called performative dramas of financial conjuring (2001, 161). Egyptian developers from the private sector breathlessly announce the profits to be made in gleaming, luxury communities. In Egypt, the rights and voices of those who might have had customary rights to the ‘empty’ desert land that the state has sold for new developments around Cairo are never heard nor are elected officials privy to decisions to sell state land.

Between 1998 and 2002, 22 percent of the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development’s (MHUUD) national investment budget went to the New Urban Communities Authority (NUCA), although it includes less than 2 percent of the population (Arab Republic of Egypt and the World Bank 2008, 61). There have been three generations of new-city construction and in the second generation, beginning in the mid-1980s twenty new towns were constructed and, today, another forty-four new cities and communities are in the development stage, while more are being developed throughout Egypt even without state approval. New desert cities are being built by various entities and comprise 282 square kilometers—or about a third of Greater Cairo (the Greater Cairo Metropolitan Area, GCMA, according to one source was approximately 928 square kilomters in 2002 [El Araby 2002, 389–90]). Plans estimate that these new desert sites will house 3.35 million inhabitants (Arab Republic of Egypt and the World Bank 2008, 56–57).

By contrast, after the 1992 earthquake and serious political violence in the ‘ashwa’iyat, the government drafted a national Program for Urban Upgrading. A recent review of it pointed out that the investment was extremely modest, when considering population density (see also Dorman in this volume). While the government targeted 5.7 million beneficiaries (yielding investments per capita of LE335), there were really more than 16 million living in these areas, which reduced the investment to less than LE115 per capita (World Bank 2008, 65, emphasis added). The initiative was top down with no public participation in conceptualizing the program, its implementation, or monitoring (World Bank 2008, 65). Finally, both the national government and international funders have a preference for funding infrastructure because it allows a comparatively uncomplicated outflow of funds, rather than the monitoring and negotiation involved in ongoing programmatic funding for social services, such as schools, which were, and still are, desperately needed in these neighborhoods (see Gertel and Schielke in this volume). In Egypt, educational attainment and continued high illiteracy rates are heavily correlated with poverty (Arab Republic of Egypt 2002, vii).

David Sims, a development consultant and author of many exhaustive articles and reports on slums and informal housing areas in Egypt, said in a recent interview: It’s so simple. If the government will put one tenth of the money it puts into New Towns into these areas, it wouldn’t be so bad. The message should be a very political one: start putting the budget where the people are (Howeidy 2009, 181).⁶

One of the new towns, called New Cairo or Qattamiya, is currently a mass of unfinished luxury gated communities, new foreign-language universities and multinational corporate offices, and industrial parks with many franchise operations for the re-assembly of goods produced elsewhere. In 2008, the American University in Cairo opened a gleaming new campus in New Cairo in a neo-Islamic style, spending close to $400 million, subsidized by a $97 million grant from USAID (Sponsored Programs 2003–2004). The university moved from a 7.8-acre campus in downtown Tahrir (Liberation) Square, the heart of the city where Nasser built the huge symbol of Egyptian bureaucracy and the post-colonial state, the Mugamma‘, to the 280-acre campus in the desert, due to the university’s inability to expand and enhance its downtown campus.

There is an air of the ‘spectacle’ about nearby gated communities and developments of single-family villas, or apartment buildings of a few stories designed for extended families. One after another promise flashier accoutrements, bigger entertainment venues, a globalized, almost de-territorialized lifestyle with all the trappings of modernity or post-modernity. One of the new developments courting international investors online is Hyde Park, the only masterplanned luxury gated community of 3000 exclusive villas with a 1 million square meter landscaped park (Video Update 2008). A narrator with a British accent advertises the gated community in an online video as:

… a world of exclusivity… with a pedestrian-friendly environment with over seven kilometers of walking and jogging trails… [where] water canals meander through the park [and] tree-lined neighborhood streets with landscaped sidewalks [surround] pocket parks … [which] … offer the ideal environment for community interaction and children can play safely in close proximity of your home. Fountains, trees, and flowerbeds create the perfect backdrop for you to relax by the sidewalk cafes and restaurants (Video Update 2008).

Khaled Adham places the growth of new luxury, entertainment fantasies within a historical context, comparing the capitalist logic and project of Heliopolis, launched in 1905 by a wealthy Belgian entrepreneur, and the more recent creation of Dreamland in the 1990s. In both the older and new projects, urban space has been reconstituted around new desires of entertainment and leisure, and fortified by consumerist norms.

In this Disneyesque urban economy, experience has been controlled, organized, enframed, and linked to a fusion of consumerism, entertainment, tourism, and lifestyle (Hannigan 1998). By enframed, I mean the tendency of this urbanity to wall off and privatize spaces. I want to make clear that a common thread runs between this new urbanity and the urbanity that guided the production of Heliopolis…. [F]rom the early stages of capitalism in Egypt, entertainment and fantasy were interwoven with the production of elite spaces. … Spatially, the production of urban entertainment fantasies in this sense would be the holding together of delusive imaginations, generated through the use of particular signs and images. ‘The holding together’, I contend, is reached through a process of financial as well as spatial exclusions. This is how liberal economy and the urban oasis, or the neoliberal economy and the gated community are all linked together (2004, 162).

In our previous volume, Cairo Cosmopolitan, Eric Denis critiqued the growth of these neoliberal gated developments because the Egyptian state sold off vast public lands and divided up its public patrimony … among a few private developers, stimulating the flow of capital through the sale of land (2006, 58). These projects were promoted and legitimated by a ‘security risk’ discourse that framed central Cairo as menacing, dirty, polluted, unsafe, and unhealthy. The upheavals in the 1980s and 1990s by Islamist movements and state cycles of repression fueled this security risk’s metanarrative (2006). More recent detailed analyses of the city’s transformation confirm that the Giza and Cairo governorates have indeed sold off 300 square kilometers of public land in the GCMA urban expansion areas in the past decade. In parallel, the New Urban Communities Authority (NUCA) released about 1,000 square kilometers of public land in the eight new urban communities over the past 25 years. In total this privatized land, which these bodies used for financing local service provision supposedly, is approximately twice as much as the contiguous urbanised and built-up area of the three governorates [Cairo, Giza, and Qalubiyya] (estimated at 600–700 square kilometers in 2000), which houses about 13 million inhabitants (Cities Alliance 2008, 15).

Enclave architecture increasingly dominates Cairo’s desert fringe yet it is a global phenomenon from Los Angeles and Florida in the United States, to wealthy communities in Mexico, Brazil, Turkey, and Tunisia as inequality and separation, inscribed spatially, become their organizing values (Caldeira 2000, 304). The question remains as to where those who work in the industrial belts in the new towns and cities and who service the universities, villas, stores, and roads will live, since affordable housing is miles away. Paradoxically, in the post-colonial world we see a return of the notion of a ‘dual city,’ which had characterized bifurcated colonial architecture that imposed residential segregation between the exogenous elite and indigenous inhabitants while building imposing edifices of state power (Adham 2004, 149). Today, neoliberalism’s exclusivity is imposing new stratification, hierarchy, distancing mechanisms, and social polarization in space (Elsheshtawy 2004, 8).

Meta-Narratives, Counter-Narratives, Modernist Planning, and Vernacular Cosmopolitanism

Chaos is one of the more frequent terms that outsiders use to describe Cairo. It is a meta-narrative that is familiar to many and is voiced not only by foreigners but by some Egyptians, including official sources. Meta-narratives are instructive because they communicate something supposedly ‘essential’ or intrinsic. Over and over again, one hears the same story about Cairo’s chaos reproduced in the foreign and domestic media, scholarship, and reports and plans about the city. Egyptians complain about Cairo’s traffic, housing, public services, the cost of living, and jobs, and foreigners experience and write about the city’s density, population, traffic, and pollution, using metaphors that denote disorder.

This meta-narrative of Cairo’s chaos is, however, the flip side of a metanarrative about order. Chaos and order are the twin meta-narratives of modernity, since the penchant for rationality, planning, order, straight lines, neat grids, vast open squares, and grand boulevards is, in fact, associated with modernity itself (Bauman 1999). As Deboulet argues in this volume, the cardinal and first rule of modern urban planning is the straight line rules which upholds the supremacy of the geometric grid. The straight line has a moral power to it because it disciplines the haphazard; both colonial architecture and post-colonial modernist urban planners see a geometric rationalized grid as a symbol of order, progress, and a means to the greater control and supervision of their cities (Deboulet in this volume).

Whatever is ‘chaotic’—demographic density, traffic patterns, noise, methods of transport, markets, Sufi festivals, and forms of housing—needs to be straightened out, fixed, re-ordered, developed, simplified, made legible, organized, modernized, beautified, and rationalized—in short, transformed so that they can be better controlled. The real problem with chaos then is that it suggests disorder and pushes Cairo back in time to a ‘traditional,’ non-modern pre-history. Chaos is threatening to Cairo’s image and understanding of itself as a modern, global city, and a regional power and international ‘player.’

Schielke explores the dynamics between disorder, chaos, and the control of public space in his chapter, which describes the transformation of the government’s relationship to, and policies toward, the very popular mulids, or saints’ festivals, which are held annually in Cairo and other areas of Egypt (see also Madoeuf 2006). The Egyptian government began to tighten the control and design of the mulids’ spatial and temporal organization after demonstrations in support of the Palestinian Intifada, or against the U.S. occupation of Iraq had begun following Friday prayers in historic mosques in the area around al-Azhar University. The flexible and ambiguous order of the mulid, where night and day are reversed in the temporary suspension of boundaries and ecstatic religiosity prevails suggested an unpredictable potential of disorder to the security police, the religious establishment (that is somewhat ambivalent about Sufism), and many middle-class intellectuals. Schielke argues that:

Control of public space in present-day administrative practice is a complex form of power that extends not only to the movement of citizens but also the meaning and the representative image of that space. It implies anti-insurgency planning designed to prevent the uncontrollable movement of crowds even at the cost of everyday functionality, but it also involves a more profound power over the use and appearance of space. This power of definition is conceived of in aesthetic terms, along oppositions such as cleanliness and filth, order and chaos, or calm and noise. A public place that falls short of these aesthetic criteria is out of control because it is not functional in the imagery and structure of the hegemonic modern city.

Schielke’s chapter describes how, in order to represent the power of the state in public spaces and civilize ‘festivity’ projects of beautification (tagmil) and development (tatwir) are undertaken around almost all major pilgrimage sites in Egypt by the ministries of Awqaf and of Housing and Urban Development, as well as by the Cairo governorate. Typically, parks and open spaces are fenced in and the use of this space has become increasingly restricted (see also Elsheshtawy 2006 and Williams 2006 for similar case studies of this phenomenon). While the saha, an open space facing a shrine, used to be an intersection and an open yet protected space whose sanctity allow[ed] the blending of different spheres of life, new urban ‘redevelopment’ and ‘beautification’ schemes now create empty spaces where the state (both symbolically and physically) dominates and restricts access to the ‘public’ square (see Schielke in this volume). Popular festivities increasingly can only be found at the margins—which is a metaphor for the mapping of state power in Cairo, more generally.

Adham’s chapter also includes a nuanced discussion of the relationship between architecture, design, urbanization, public culture, community, ideology, and the changing institutional design of Egypt’s aesthetic and cultural identity. He notes the increased institutional linkages between tourism and instrumentalizing Egypt’s cultural heritage embodied and symbolized by the Ministry of Culture’s change of name to the Ministry of Culture and Civilizational Planning (Wizarat al-Thaqafa wa-l-Tansiq al-Hadari) in 1993 (see also Mitchell 2001; Williams 2006; AlSayyad 2001). The new charge for the institution included responsibility for the aesthetic values of all buildings and cities in Egypt, particularly those found in popular tourist destinations.

The same struggle over public space, the boundaries between local communities and the state, and the aesthetic and symbolic representation of national identity and state power can also be seen in Adham’s chapter about the design, construction, and usage of a children’s park in Sayyida Zeinab sponsored by the Egyptian Ministry of Culture in the 1980s. An innovative architect, Abdel Halim Ibrahim Abdel Halim, envisaged a park that not only included various services for children but that would also offer an open boundary to, and engagement with, the local community. An institutional partnership between the